The present disclosure relates to video coding systems involving encoding terminals and decoding terminals, and coding protocols therefor.
There has been considerable interest, especially during the last decade, in achieving power reduction and improving energy efficiency on a variety of applications, such as lighting, car fuel efficiency, as well as the various home or office electrical and electronic devices. This is driven by the desire to save on fuel resources, reduce costs, as well as, in the case of mobile devices, prolong battery and usage time. Most of these savings are achieved through the use of new material, improved fabrication and design processes and hardware, as well as more efficient algorithms and software that may run on such systems. Mobile phones, for example, now use improved semiconductor device fabrication processes as well as more efficient displays to save on power.
At the same time, however, new usage models and applications such as enhanced video delivery and streaming may themselves demand more power from such devices, potentially reducing the benefits achieved through manufacturing. As an example, it is suggested that decoding complexity of the HEVC/H.265 standard may be as close to 2× higher than that of AVC/H.264. In the USA, some estimates state that Internet video currently takes up ˜78% of the total Internet traffic, with a significant percentage being consumed on mobile devices. By 2016, it is expected that Internet consumption on mobile devices, including video, would far exceed that consumption on wired devices.
The inventors perceive a need for a coder/decoder system that permits a decoder to dynamically switch among a variety of decoding protocols when local processing environments favor resource conservation. Moreover, the inventors perceive a need for such a system that permits a decoder to estimate when circumstances are favorable for a switch to a resource conservation decoding mode, for example, when loss of resultant image quality would be minimized.